Here in the U.S., the idea of taking even a few weeks off between jobs as a way to refresh oneself is a real luxury because of the way health insurance is tied to employment.
I have wanted to do this each time I've left a job, but a lapse in health insurance would have been too risky for my family, and COBRA is too expensive to be anything other than an option of last resort. So, the most time I've had between jobs over the past 25 years has been a couple of days.
If health care were not so tightly tied to one's employer, I could see people saving up and taking a few months off every 3-5 years as they change jobs. For me, a summer off with my kids would be a tremendous joy. But I don't think I'd be able to afford it until I retire, and by then my kids will be all grown up.
The trick I learned from a kind manager is to make your last day something early in the month and your first day on the new job the last week of the same month. In short if your time off doesn’t actually cross a month boundary your old insurance will still be in effect.
Just make sure when doing so you don’t work at the sort of place that’ll let you go as soon as you put in your notice.
You also have 60 days from when your coverage ends to elect to enroll in COBRA, and for many plans coverage is retroactive to when your original coverage ended (although you have to pay premiums retroactively, too). That gives you close to 3 months between intentional job changes where there is health insurance available if you need it, but you do not have to pay for it if you do not need it.
I have a hard time seeing the ability to change jobs every 3-5 years effectively. Last year I got laid off and it took me >6 months to find a new job. Yes, that time off was amazing (like a vacation) but in IT the market is hard right now at best.
Leaving a job is a “life event” so couldn’t you then go out and get a simple marketplace plan? Last I checked it was only a few hundred dollars per month for a single individual?
They mention having kids, so presumably it's more expensive. And on top of that, if you have nontrivial medical needs, the cheap marketplace plans often don't cover a lot of medications or treatments, or will make you redo things like step therapy before covering them. Or they'll have high deductibles which will leave you on the hook for most/all expenses if you're not on the plan for long enough to fill up the deductible.
While I understand the idea of american private health insurance, I don't get how do you have to pay for kids. Do you have to pay for primary school too?
It is astronomically higher for a family, as they said they have. The better way would probably be to go on a spouses plan and swap back and forth that way, but that also is a luxury that most underestimate.
For many years I often wondered why wealthy American capitalists (except for the ones in insurance, obviously) didn't actively promote socialized medicine that would free their companies from having to provide health insurance to their employees: it'd be better for their bottom line, wouldn't it? Healthier workforce, lower expenses per headcount, etc. I figured it must just be a generational thing from those who grew up during the Red Scare to distrust anything "socialized."
It's been in recent years, though, that I have come to see that it's still _very_ much in their interest to have employees who already have a job to feel _scared_ to leave it. I don't think this is an organized operation, there's no annual meeting of US company HR departments who scheme about it, I doubt it's something actively thought about by many people very often, but all the same the loss of corporate-provided insurance would do _so much_ to loosen the fears that keep people working for jobs that it would no doubt have a _large_ effect on the economy and every company. The biggest effect would be that it'd be extremely simple to leave a low-paying job to seek a higher wage if you have just enough saved up to cover rent and living expenses for the interim.
As such, it finally makes sense to me why so many of the wealthy choose not to lobby for socialized medicine or even to actively fund lobbying against it even if they're not involved in the insanely-powerful for-profit health industry themselves or to lobby in other countries to weaken/dismantle/destroy their existing systems (yes, I know that with an aging population costs of care are getting higher everywhere, but a lot of the funding issues with UK NHS and Canada Medicare are also political in origin): it weakens labor and wages more than they ever have to spend on insurance.
I assume it's a part of the "live to work" mindset, popular among folks who don't really buy into work-life balance as an idea worth pursuing. Not my mindset but I can imagine it and have certainly met folks who exude it. Might also correlate for folks who have trouble compartmentalizing in general (e.g. "whatever I'm doing in my life is the sole purpose at that time").
Certainly NOT an American way to describe anything, it's a wannabe "influencer" way to make a totally normal thing that everyone does sound like a cool thing you just invented because you believe yourself to be a Very Important thought leader.
I've developed a HACK to LOSE WEIGHT and have MORE ENERGY in the morning! Here's what you do: the night before, after dinner, you start FASTING - no eating meals, like, at all! Then you go to bed, and when you get up in the morning, you eat something again. I call that clever hack "breaking your fast", but my marketing team is still working on it!
One way you can "break your fast" is an ANCIENT TECHNIQUE uncovered from the OLD WORLD; you take your cheese and your ham, and you put it in between two slices of bread. That way, you can eat your "break fast" meal WITH YOUR HANDS! No dirty dishes!
The kids called it Quiet quitting, and it is a result of an asymmetric power distance index with capital investment managers.
Loyalty is almost never rewarded in the long-term for North American tech sector burn-and-churn, so jumping firms every year or two is common place. Mostly because gullible boards believe all workers are fungible, and in many cases they are right as most graduates do share a common history. =3
One level above that is something I do every week - I simply... don't work, for TWO WHOLE DAYS a week. That gives me time to relax, sleep in, do maintenance and cleaning jobs in and around the house. I do it at the end of the week, maybe someone from marketing can think of a clever name for that period of the week.
So like a vacation? I'm wondering why retirement is a good term for this. A sabbatical is already a break that's smaller than a retirement, and this is shorter than that. A 3 month gap between jobs is kinda just taking a break.
A label might help explain it on resumes if anyone is checking for gaps though of course.
I did this in the summer of 2019. My girlfriend and I lived in her Subaru for the summer, and drove across the country visiting a bunch of national parks.
I'm currently weighing up a sabbatical (3 months), for a bunch of reasons.
A vacation (or holiday, or PTO, or whatever you call it locally), is great, but normally too short to properly reset. I often come back thinking "I could do with another couple of those right now". The main purpose for those for me is to travel and get away from home for a week or two and experience new things.
What I'm more excited about is taking a few months to basically do very little. Read, walk, no alarms in the morning, no Sunday night anxiety, no wishing it was Friday. Just wake up, do what feels right, don't work, don't do anything.
I'm in my late 40s, I have chronic health issues, and have symptoms of burn out, so even this might feel "too short", but I think it's such a valuable experiment to try, it's got to be done.
Stefan Sagmeister talks about taking 5 years of your retirement and interspersing them into your working years in this great talk, pertinent moments at 01:30-02:00:
I am involuntarily in a mini retirement. The very previous job turned out to be a disaster. I have been enjoying this opportunity by traveling a lot with my partner, exercising a lot more, meeting old friends, visiting family, playing unfinished games, and reading novels a lot. It’s been great. But there is always a certain pressure back in my mind for my career forward. I wonder if it’s become more or less common to hop between jobs every two to three years. I cannot see myself staying in a company for a decade long. Maybe it’s just because I was always working for startups, rather intense environments.
Can anyone share their experience with such 1+ month "vacations", while having a family with wife and 2+ kids?
It's cool to read about author's experiences with travelling and making new friends abroad, but that's only possible if you live alone with no dependent people. I know if I took such vacation today, all the 8h of time gained daily would be just sucked out by my kids and everyone around.
author here, this is the differentiation I meant, and I didn't make it clear enough before - I added now a callout to clarify this more:
> To me, vacations are too short to turn off completely. Here, where I live, we have 5 weeks a year, if you are lucky, you can take three in a row in summer. But having two months or more, it’s completely different. Your mind will take time to turn off, to shut down from everyday life, and that’s when the benefit of new ideas comes, usually out of the blue, not forced just because your mind and body are resting from work and everything else.
I second that, EU here. Most of my colleagues take either 5 days (which creates 9 days free in a row effectively, when combined with weekends) or 10 days (which creates 16). Any normal vacation over this requires special approval and I know only 1 person that even wanted that. The only cases when someone is away for longer are medical leaves after severe accidents (in practice unlimited) or parental leaves (could me maxxed to ~1.5 years when done smart, but doesn't happen in practice).
Three-four weeks can happen, at least here in Poland. They are pretty rare but I know bunch of people who did this, myself included. Usually for prolonged vacations in far away regions - Japan, South America, Australia etc.
Retirements imply a regular payment called a pension, either from the government or from a private fund that you contribute to during employment years. It doesn't seem to be the case with the author.
Plus with or without a generous retirement fund to rely on, one of the other major features is the way you may want to be even more active professionally than before.
Perhaps not right away and often taking the opportunity to do something completely different going forward, and on your own terms more so than ever.
All of which can be out-of-the-question without a realistic mind-set of retiring from "something", in the extreme case ending up doing almost none of the routine tasks that were so critical to career development and maintenance up until then.
The way compound interest works then the impact of taking months off mid-career can have a huge impact on retirement age. I'd personally rather just work continuously and retire younger.
What the OP likely meant, is leaving a gap between leaving a job and starting next one. It's usually easier to push employment date by a month than getting a month-long vacation after starting the job.
This is what I ment. But I also realized that most people don't have the luxury of unemployed money which makes changing jobs way less risky generally.
We should really make a name for press and blogosphere legitimizing (by the virtue of mere coverage) all those silly trends that really just are a response to late-stage capitalism. "Analog bag" being the most recent example.
Here in the U.S., the idea of taking even a few weeks off between jobs as a way to refresh oneself is a real luxury because of the way health insurance is tied to employment.
I have wanted to do this each time I've left a job, but a lapse in health insurance would have been too risky for my family, and COBRA is too expensive to be anything other than an option of last resort. So, the most time I've had between jobs over the past 25 years has been a couple of days.
If health care were not so tightly tied to one's employer, I could see people saving up and taking a few months off every 3-5 years as they change jobs. For me, a summer off with my kids would be a tremendous joy. But I don't think I'd be able to afford it until I retire, and by then my kids will be all grown up.
The trick I learned from a kind manager is to make your last day something early in the month and your first day on the new job the last week of the same month. In short if your time off doesn’t actually cross a month boundary your old insurance will still be in effect.
Just make sure when doing so you don’t work at the sort of place that’ll let you go as soon as you put in your notice.
You also have 60 days from when your coverage ends to elect to enroll in COBRA, and for many plans coverage is retroactive to when your original coverage ended (although you have to pay premiums retroactively, too). That gives you close to 3 months between intentional job changes where there is health insurance available if you need it, but you do not have to pay for it if you do not need it.
I have a hard time seeing the ability to change jobs every 3-5 years effectively. Last year I got laid off and it took me >6 months to find a new job. Yes, that time off was amazing (like a vacation) but in IT the market is hard right now at best.
It's easier to find a new job when you already have one.
Leaving a job is a “life event” so couldn’t you then go out and get a simple marketplace plan? Last I checked it was only a few hundred dollars per month for a single individual?
They mention having kids, so presumably it's more expensive. And on top of that, if you have nontrivial medical needs, the cheap marketplace plans often don't cover a lot of medications or treatments, or will make you redo things like step therapy before covering them. Or they'll have high deductibles which will leave you on the hook for most/all expenses if you're not on the plan for long enough to fill up the deductible.
While I understand the idea of american private health insurance, I don't get how do you have to pay for kids. Do you have to pay for primary school too?
It is astronomically higher for a family, as they said they have. The better way would probably be to go on a spouses plan and swap back and forth that way, but that also is a luxury that most underestimate.
For many years I often wondered why wealthy American capitalists (except for the ones in insurance, obviously) didn't actively promote socialized medicine that would free their companies from having to provide health insurance to their employees: it'd be better for their bottom line, wouldn't it? Healthier workforce, lower expenses per headcount, etc. I figured it must just be a generational thing from those who grew up during the Red Scare to distrust anything "socialized."
It's been in recent years, though, that I have come to see that it's still _very_ much in their interest to have employees who already have a job to feel _scared_ to leave it. I don't think this is an organized operation, there's no annual meeting of US company HR departments who scheme about it, I doubt it's something actively thought about by many people very often, but all the same the loss of corporate-provided insurance would do _so much_ to loosen the fears that keep people working for jobs that it would no doubt have a _large_ effect on the economy and every company. The biggest effect would be that it'd be extremely simple to leave a low-paying job to seek a higher wage if you have just enough saved up to cover rent and living expenses for the interim.
As such, it finally makes sense to me why so many of the wealthy choose not to lobby for socialized medicine or even to actively fund lobbying against it even if they're not involved in the insanely-powerful for-profit health industry themselves or to lobby in other countries to weaken/dismantle/destroy their existing systems (yes, I know that with an aging population costs of care are getting higher everywhere, but a lot of the funding issues with UK NHS and Canada Medicare are also political in origin): it weakens labor and wages more than they ever have to spend on insurance.
Is this some weird american way of describing a vacation?
It is, the article tries to dodge the question saying they can't take long enough vacations, but that's an US centric problem.
I assume it's a part of the "live to work" mindset, popular among folks who don't really buy into work-life balance as an idea worth pursuing. Not my mindset but I can imagine it and have certainly met folks who exude it. Might also correlate for folks who have trouble compartmentalizing in general (e.g. "whatever I'm doing in my life is the sole purpose at that time").
The blogger is Swiss from the looks of it.
There's 4 weeks of paid holidays in switzerland, though more and more employers are now offering 5 weeks
Certainly NOT an American way to describe anything, it's a wannabe "influencer" way to make a totally normal thing that everyone does sound like a cool thing you just invented because you believe yourself to be a Very Important thought leader.
I've developed a HACK to LOSE WEIGHT and have MORE ENERGY in the morning! Here's what you do: the night before, after dinner, you start FASTING - no eating meals, like, at all! Then you go to bed, and when you get up in the morning, you eat something again. I call that clever hack "breaking your fast", but my marketing team is still working on it!
One way you can "break your fast" is an ANCIENT TECHNIQUE uncovered from the OLD WORLD; you take your cheese and your ham, and you put it in between two slices of bread. That way, you can eat your "break fast" meal WITH YOUR HANDS! No dirty dishes!
LIFe: HACKED!
The kids called it Quiet quitting, and it is a result of an asymmetric power distance index with capital investment managers.
Loyalty is almost never rewarded in the long-term for North American tech sector burn-and-churn, so jumping firms every year or two is common place. Mostly because gullible boards believe all workers are fungible, and in many cases they are right as most graduates do share a common history. =3
The thing described in the blog post has nothing to do with quiet quitting.
That is funny, most youth can't duck their student loan payments, and protest in odd ways like a trust-fund kid.
Hired one or two gold-brickers over the years, it is kind of like a pack of Pokemon cards. Always a surprise, and not always a fun surprise. =3
Great idea! I have micro retirements every year for 30 days. My company calls it vacation, but micro retirement is a better term I like.
Even more than that, I have nano retirements every now and then. We call them holidays. What a lame term, I know.
I am very fond of pico retirements, I mean, going home at 5 pm and not working until 9 am the next day. I highly recommend everyone to try such.
One level above that is something I do every week - I simply... don't work, for TWO WHOLE DAYS a week. That gives me time to relax, sleep in, do maintenance and cleaning jobs in and around the house. I do it at the end of the week, maybe someone from marketing can think of a clever name for that period of the week.
So like a vacation? I'm wondering why retirement is a good term for this. A sabbatical is already a break that's smaller than a retirement, and this is shorter than that. A 3 month gap between jobs is kinda just taking a break.
A label might help explain it on resumes if anyone is checking for gaps though of course.
A break is just not as sellable. We need to call them something different so we can have blog posts and podcasts about them
So you don't worry so much about having excessive, big, capital R Retirement, you can retire too! Just mini retirement.
I did this in the summer of 2019. My girlfriend and I lived in her Subaru for the summer, and drove across the country visiting a bunch of national parks.
Writeup here: https://cushychicken.github.io/leave-of-absence/
We had a ton of fun doing it. I loved it. A lot of why I loved it was because it reaffirmed how much I love my work.
I want to do something similar in my late 30s / early 40s, now that my girlfriend is now my wife, and we're starting a family together.
beautiful write up, thanks for sharing. I'm adding it to the "further reads". Love the "pre-tirement" term :)
I'm currently weighing up a sabbatical (3 months), for a bunch of reasons.
A vacation (or holiday, or PTO, or whatever you call it locally), is great, but normally too short to properly reset. I often come back thinking "I could do with another couple of those right now". The main purpose for those for me is to travel and get away from home for a week or two and experience new things.
What I'm more excited about is taking a few months to basically do very little. Read, walk, no alarms in the morning, no Sunday night anxiety, no wishing it was Friday. Just wake up, do what feels right, don't work, don't do anything.
I'm in my late 40s, I have chronic health issues, and have symptoms of burn out, so even this might feel "too short", but I think it's such a valuable experiment to try, it's got to be done.
Stefan Sagmeister talks about taking 5 years of your retirement and interspersing them into your working years in this great talk, pertinent moments at 01:30-02:00:
https://youtu.be/MNuOmTQdFjA?t=79&is=0GYzcLwy9fhQWqHR
I am involuntarily in a mini retirement. The very previous job turned out to be a disaster. I have been enjoying this opportunity by traveling a lot with my partner, exercising a lot more, meeting old friends, visiting family, playing unfinished games, and reading novels a lot. It’s been great. But there is always a certain pressure back in my mind for my career forward. I wonder if it’s become more or less common to hop between jobs every two to three years. I cannot see myself staying in a company for a decade long. Maybe it’s just because I was always working for startups, rather intense environments.
Can anyone share their experience with such 1+ month "vacations", while having a family with wife and 2+ kids?
It's cool to read about author's experiences with travelling and making new friends abroad, but that's only possible if you live alone with no dependent people. I know if I took such vacation today, all the 8h of time gained daily would be just sucked out by my kids and everyone around.
I guess the hope would be that you want to spend more time with your family and not see it as time being "sucked out"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx-Htb8ngQg
Gary Neville's mini-retirement hot take was the first thing I thought of when reading headline.
It's no revolutionary idea, but the comments here are dishonest when they compare a 3-month leave to standard european vacation.
I would say most middle class europeans take like 10-14 day long vacations. I sometimes travel for a month and that is already abnormal.
author here, this is the differentiation I meant, and I didn't make it clear enough before - I added now a callout to clarify this more:
> To me, vacations are too short to turn off completely. Here, where I live, we have 5 weeks a year, if you are lucky, you can take three in a row in summer. But having two months or more, it’s completely different. Your mind will take time to turn off, to shut down from everyday life, and that’s when the benefit of new ideas comes, usually out of the blue, not forced just because your mind and body are resting from work and everything else.
I agree with you that it is very different.
I second that, EU here. Most of my colleagues take either 5 days (which creates 9 days free in a row effectively, when combined with weekends) or 10 days (which creates 16). Any normal vacation over this requires special approval and I know only 1 person that even wanted that. The only cases when someone is away for longer are medical leaves after severe accidents (in practice unlimited) or parental leaves (could me maxxed to ~1.5 years when done smart, but doesn't happen in practice).
Three-four weeks can happen, at least here in Poland. They are pretty rare but I know bunch of people who did this, myself included. Usually for prolonged vacations in far away regions - Japan, South America, Australia etc.
Retirements imply a regular payment called a pension, either from the government or from a private fund that you contribute to during employment years. It doesn't seem to be the case with the author.
Plus with or without a generous retirement fund to rely on, one of the other major features is the way you may want to be even more active professionally than before.
Perhaps not right away and often taking the opportunity to do something completely different going forward, and on your own terms more so than ever.
All of which can be out-of-the-question without a realistic mind-set of retiring from "something", in the extreme case ending up doing almost none of the routine tasks that were so critical to career development and maintenance up until then.
The way compound interest works then the impact of taking months off mid-career can have a huge impact on retirement age. I'd personally rather just work continuously and retire younger.
Anyone NOT doing this between jobs?
In-between jobs you are stressed to find the next job, that's not a good background for vacation.
It's not in-between, it's unemployment.
What the OP likely meant, is leaving a gap between leaving a job and starting next one. It's usually easier to push employment date by a month than getting a month-long vacation after starting the job.
This is what I ment. But I also realized that most people don't have the luxury of unemployed money which makes changing jobs way less risky generally.
That was trivial to do in ~2019, when one could quit a job today and be sure to find another one next month. Today, not possible.
So just a vacation then?
Don't fall for this rebranding.
We should really make a name for press and blogosphere legitimizing (by the virtue of mere coverage) all those silly trends that really just are a response to late-stage capitalism. "Analog bag" being the most recent example.
I'm a fan of the phrase "analog emoji", :)
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